Most stores pay somewhere between $80 and $200 a month, per register, just to ring up a sale. You pay it every month, forever, and on the day you stop paying, the register stops working. We set up a checkout system you buy once and own — it runs on a $12-a-month computer you rent in your own name, it keeps working whether or not you ever hear from us again, and your sales history stays yours.
Same barcode scanner. Same receipt printer. Same card reader. No monthly software fee.
$699 once
Replaces roughly $178/month for two registers. Pays for itself in month four.
Just one register and no website? $399. Want us to keep it running and post your new arrivals? Add $149 a month, cancel any time.
Two sliders. Everything is per year, because that is how you close your books.
The math, so you can check it against your own invoices. Subscription side: $89 per register per month, which is $1,068 a year per register, plus 0.6% of your card volume as the markup for being locked to their payment processing. This side: $699 once, then $108 a year for the server — that is all, every year, forever. We do NOT count card processing fees as savings. You pay a processor no matter whose software runs the register, and any calculator that counts them is padding its own number.
A touchscreen checkout that scans barcodes, prints receipts, tracks what is on the shelf and calculates your state and local sales tax. Your staff learn it in an afternoon. It looks and works like the register you already have.
Your website sells from the same inventory as the counter. Sell the last one in the store and the website stops offering it, that second — no nightly upload, no overselling something you already sold to someone standing in front of you.
When you receive new stock, it gets posted to your Google listing, Instagram and Facebook the same day — automatically, from what you already entered at the back door. This is the part most owners never get around to, which is exactly why it is worth automating.
No vague promises. This is the software, the configuration and the access — item by item, so you can compare it against any other quote.
Odoo 18 Community Edition — the free, open-source version. Not Odoo Enterprise, which has its own per-user licence. There is no plugin to buy.
Software that is installed but not configured is not a working register. This is the part that takes the afternoon.
Four things. The 24-hour clock starts when we have the first two.
| Platform | Included | What you must have | How you authorise us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | Yes | A verified listing for your store | You add us as a manager, or click one approval screen |
| Facebook Page | Yes | A Page, not a personal profile | One approval screen on Facebook |
| Yes | A Business or Creator account linked to that Page. A personal account cannot be posted to by any tool. | Same approval screen as the Page | |
| TikTok | No, and we will not pretend otherwise | TikTok requires a separate application review before any tool may publish on your behalf | Ask us and we will quote it separately |
This matters, so read it twice. Nobody should ever ask for your Facebook, Instagram or Google password — not us, not any agency. Handing over a password gives away everything on that account, cannot be limited, and is against those platforms' own terms.
Instead you click an approval screen on the platform itself, which grants exactly one permission: publish posts. You see what is being granted before you accept, and you can revoke it from your own settings at any moment, without telling us. If we ever asked you for a password, that would be the moment to stop working with us.
What gets posted: the product name, your photo of it, the price if you want it shown, and a short line of text. You approve each post, or you switch it to publish on its own. That choice is yours and it is reversible.
One server per store, rented in your name, paid by you — about $12 a month. We never put two stores on one machine. Another shop's traffic cannot slow your register, another shop's mistake cannot reach your sales, and if you ever stop working with us, nothing has to be untangled: the server is already yours.
This is the single most important thing on this page. Your card reader talks to your payment processor directly. Card numbers do not pass through the register software and are never stored on your server — the register only ever learns that a payment of a certain amount succeeded. That is what keeps a self-hosted till out of the hardest parts of card-industry compliance.
Your products, your prices, your sales history, and any customer names and emails you choose to record. It sits in a database that only your server can reach — not exposed to the internet. Traffic is encrypted, access is by key rather than password, and the nightly backup is encrypted before it leaves the machine. You can export all of it, at any time, without asking us.
Three ways of paying for a register, and what each one actually costs over three years.
| What it costs you | Square / Clover | Shopify POS Pro | Odoo consulting partner | This service |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software, per register, per month | $60 – $89 | $89, plus the Shopify plan | $35 – $45 per user | $0, forever |
| What you pay to get started | Nothing, plus their hardware | Nothing, plus their hardware | $5,000 – $20,000 | $399 or $699, once |
| How long before you are selling | A day or two, you do it | A day or two, you do it | 6 to 12 weeks | 24 to 48 hours, we do it |
| Who processes your cards | Theirs only | Extra fee if you use anyone else | Whatever they integrate | Whoever gives you the best rate |
| Store and website share one stock | A paid add-on | Included, on their platform | Custom development | Included in the $699 package |
| Posting to Google Maps and social | Not offered | Third-party apps, billed monthly | Not offered | The $149 monthly plan |
| Who owns it in three years | They do | They do | You, if the contract says so | You, on a server in your name |
| Three years, two registers | $7,400+ | $9,800+ | $12,000+ | $699 + $432 of hosting |
About the first three columns: those are published list prices as advertised in September 2026, for the plans a single-location store would actually buy. We have not purchased any of them, so treat them as a starting point and check the current pricing yourself before you decide — vendors change it, and a comparison table is not a quote. The last column is ours and we hold to it: $699 once, plus a server at roughly $12 a month, which is the $432 over three years. Card processing is excluded on every column, because you pay a processor whichever system runs the register.
Then nothing happens to your register. That is the whole point. The software is free and open, it runs on a computer you rent in your own name, and we hand you the passwords on day one. If we vanished tomorrow, any competent IT person could pick it up — and if you ever want to leave us, there is nothing to cancel. Compare that to what happens when your current provider decides your plan is discontinued.
This is the honest weak spot, so here it is straight. On the $29 monthly plan, we do — we monitor it and we answer. Without that plan, you do, or whoever you normally call. If that answer makes you uncomfortable, take the plan or stay on a subscription. A register that goes down with nobody to call is worse than a monthly bill, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to close a sale.
To use it, no — it is a touchscreen with your products on it, and your staff pick it up in an afternoon. To run it, also no, if you take the maintenance plan. What you do need is to decide you would rather own this than rent it, and to give us an afternoon of your time during setup so the product list and tax rates are right.
For the curious: this runs on Odoo 18 Community with PostgreSQL, in Docker, behind nginx. You do not need to know any of that to use it — but we deployed it on our own server, measured what it consumes and wrote it all down, including the parts that went wrong. Read the full technical guide
Two setups you buy once, and one optional monthly plan. Nothing else appears on your bill.
$399
once, then nothing
For a shop that needs a dependable checkout and is done paying rent for one.
$699
once, then nothing
For a shop selling in person and online, from one shared stock.
$149
per month, optional add-on
For an owner who wants foot traffic and never wants to think about a server.
One recurring cost, and it is not paid to us. You open a hosting account in your own name and pay the hosting company directly — about $12 a month for a server that runs all of this. We never touch that card, and the setup packages carry no licence, so there is nothing further to pay us at all. The $149 plan includes the server; without it, that $12 is yours.
We are new at selling this, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing you caught. There are no customer photos on this page and no testimonials, because we have not installed enough of these to have earned them. Here is what you can verify instead.
Every number we quote came from running this on a server we pay for. 19 guides on this site show the commands, the results and the mistakes — including a figure we published and corrected the same day when a second measurement proved it wrong. Ask any other supplier for theirs.
This is the part that should matter most to you. The server is rented in your name, the software is free and open, and you hold the keys from the first day. If we turn out to be useless, you have paid once for an installation that keeps running without us — not a subscription you now have to escape.
The section below names five cases where we tell you to keep your current till, including a leased card reader you will not be able to reuse and the UK MTD filing this software does not do. A supplier who cannot name what they are bad at is selling, not advising.
Being early has a price and it should be yours, not ours: if you are among our first installations, tell us and we will agree what happens if it does not work out — before you pay, in writing.
We would rather lose the sale than install this in a shop it does not suit. Five cases where the honest answer is to keep what you have.
A reader supplied by Square, Shopify, SumUp or Zettle is generally tied to that company. Assume it will not work with anything else and that you will be buying a new one. If the lease still has a year to run, moving now costs you twice.
This software records your sales properly, but it does not file your VAT return and it is not certified for UK Making Tax Digital, nor for the fiscal-printer rules in Italy, Germany, Poland or Portugal. If your accountant needs a certified chain from the till, stay where you are.
The register runs in a browser against your own server. It keeps taking sales through a short drop and syncs afterwards, but a shop that loses connection for hours at a time should not run its till this way.
We are a small operation. We answer on working days and we say so rather than printing a support badge we cannot honour. If a till failure at 2am would cost you the trading day, buy a contract with a guaranteed response time — from us only if we have agreed one in writing, otherwise elsewhere.
If your current system works, your staff know it and the monthly fee does not bother you, changing your till is a week of disruption for no gain. This is worth doing when the fees have become the problem — not because self-hosting is virtuous.
Nothing here is locked to a brand. The register speaks three open standards — ESC/POS for printers, keyboard mode for scanners, and Stripe Terminal for card readers — so equipment that speaks them works, whoever made it.
ESC/POS over network or USB
A network printer prints as the sale completes, with no dialogue to confirm. Ethernet models are worth the small premium over USB once you have more than one register.
Stripe Terminal
Chip, contactless, Apple Pay and Google Pay. The reader talks to Stripe directly — card numbers never reach your register, and the money lands in your own bank account.
USB or Bluetooth keyboard mode
The scanner simply types the barcode and presses Enter. There is no driver to install and nothing to configure beyond setting the suffix to Enter.
Any modern browser
The register runs in Chrome or Safari. The work happens on your server, so a modest tablet is enough — which is the point of this architecture.
Already have hardware from Square or Clover? Send us the model numbers and we will tell you what works before you spend anything — including when the honest answer is that a device is locked to its old system and cannot be reused.
A note on the model names above: they are the devices we most often see in shops, listed because they speak these standards — not because we hold each one on a test bench. We check your specific model against your setup before you buy, which is the only assurance worth giving.
Ownership, what happens when things go wrong, and how the money reaches you.
The register keeps working. Odoo 18 POS loads your catalogue into the browser when the session opens, so scanning, cash payments and receipts continue while the connection to the internet is out, and every sale syncs automatically when it returns. One honest caveat: your receipt printer is reached over your shop network, so a dead router stops printing even though a dead internet line does not. If continuity matters that much to you, the server belongs in the building rather than in a data centre.
You do, entirely. The system runs on a private server rented in your name, and you hold the keys to it from day one. You can export the whole database at any moment without asking us, and there is nothing to migrate away from because nothing of yours sits on our infrastructure. That is the difference between owning a system and renting access to one.
Your register carries on exactly as before. There is no kill switch, and there could not be one — the software is open source and it is installed on your machine. We hand over anything you do not already hold, disconnect the marketing automation, and you continue paying only your server, about $12 a month, directly to the hosting company. The software stays yours permanently.
Through your own Stripe account, using a Stripe Terminal reader. The money moves from Stripe to your business account on the payout schedule Stripe sets for you, which depends on your country and how long the account has been open — check yours in the Stripe dashboard rather than trusting a number on a sales page. We take no cut and add no gateway markup; our fee is the one-time setup.
Yes, and it is included: up to 2,500 products in either setup package. We export from Square, Shopify, Clover, Lightspeed or a spreadsheet, clean the file, and import it with your SKUs, prices, barcodes and current quantities intact. Larger catalogues are quoted separately rather than quietly truncated.
Yes. Odoo Community is published under the LGPLv3 open-source licence, so there is no per-seat and no per-register charge — add cashiers, add registers, ring up as many sales as you like. What you pay for is our work installing and configuring it, and the server it runs on. Odoo Enterprise is a separate paid product; we do not deploy it and you do not need it for a shop.
We reply within one business day with a price and a date. No sales call unless you ask for one, and no obligation.
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